What people say and what they think: Children's judgements of false belief in relation to their recall of false messages

Abstract

In three investigations, 3‐ and 4‐year olds recalled utterances made by a speaker with a false belief under three different conditions: Either they or another person gave the utterance and the children wrongly assumed the utterance was true when it was made (own belief‐self ignorant and other belief‐self ignorant conditions), or another person was the speaker and the child knew the utterance was false when it was made (other belief‐self knowledgeable condition). Recall of false utterances was equally good in both the ocher belief conditions, but poor in the own belief‐self ignorant condition. Despite recalling accurately what the other person had said, children made realist errors in judging what the speaker thought. It appears that children do not necessarily connect what people say with what they think, and contrary to Wimmer & Hartl's (1991) result, it is only for self that realist errors occur in recall of false utterances. The results suggest chat there may be self/other differences in children's reasoning about the mind.